Diverse Stakeholder Engagement and Shared Power

This week’s collaborative leadership competency, Diverse Stakeholder Engagement, helped me think about who needs to be meaningfully involved in the growth of the SweetGrass Wellness Collective. Leadership Learning Community (2015) emphasizes that successful collaborative efforts require diverse stakeholders and that community members should not only be seen as clients, but as people with agency, expertise, and the ability to shape change. That point feels central to SweetGrass because the work is not only about providing services to families. It is about building a community-based maternal health ecosystem with families, birthworkers, providers, advocates, and community members.

For my project, diverse stakeholder engagement means intentionally including the people most connected to the work and most impacted by gaps in perinatal care. This includes pregnant and postpartum families, Black and Brown families, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander families, Micronesian families, LGBTQIA2+ families, military-connected families, Spanish-speaking families, midwives, doulas, lactation professionals, mental health providers, community educators, cultural practitioners, funders, policy advocates, and partner organizations.

My stakeholder engagement plan would include both internal and external strategies. Internally, SweetGrass needs a strong membership and advisory structure so members understand their roles, responsibilities, and shared values. The Advisory Council can help provide wisdom, accountability, cultural guidance, and community perspective. Collective members can help identify gaps, support programming, make referrals, and bring feedback from the communities they serve.

Externally, SweetGrass needs ongoing relationships with families, community organizations, clinical providers, public health partners, and advocacy groups. This could include parent circles, feedback forms, community listening sessions, advisory conversations, partner meetings, and targeted outreach to communities that may not yet be fully represented in our membership or programming. The goal is not just to invite people into spaces we have already designed, but to allow their input to shape what those spaces become.

This week, we held our monthly SweetGrass meeting and integrated four new members into the Collective: another doula, an APRN psychiatric nurse, a midwife, and a bilingual Spanish-speaking IBCLC. This felt like an important step toward diverse stakeholder engagement because each new member expands the Collective’s capacity and perspective. The APRN brings mental health expertise, which is important because postpartum and perinatal care cannot be separated from emotional wellness. The bilingual Spanish-speaking IBCLC increases language access and helps us better support families who may otherwise face communication barriers. The new doula and midwife strengthen our birthwork and community-based care network.

At the same time, four members exited the Collective due to accountability concerns. That part was difficult, but it helped us formally test our interview, onboarding, membership, and accountability processes. It reminded me that diverse stakeholder engagement is not only about bringing people in. It is also about making sure there is alignment with the mission, values, and expectations of the Collective. A diverse group still needs shared agreements, accountability, and a process for repair or transition when alignment is not present.

This experience helped me understand that engagement without structure can become confusing, but structure without humility can become exclusionary. SweetGrass has to balance openness with accountability. We want to welcome people with different skills, experiences, and perspectives, but we also need to protect the integrity of the work and the safety of the families we serve.

The MCH Leadership Competencies also connect to this reflection because they emphasize skills such as communication, negotiation and conflict resolution, diversity, equity, inclusion, honoring lived experience, interdisciplinary team building, and systems thinking. These competencies are directly relevant to SweetGrass because diverse stakeholder engagement requires more than representation. It requires the ability to listen well, navigate difference, address power dynamics, and create processes where people can contribute meaningfully.

One challenge I am noticing is that not every community we hope to serve is equally represented yet. For example, we need to continue strengthening relationships with Micronesian communities, Native Hawaiian communities, families living in public housing, families on Medicaid, and families who may not already be connected to birthwork spaces. If we fail to achieve a truly diverse group, the next step should not be to assume people are uninterested. It should be to ask what barriers we created or failed to remove.

Those barriers may include meeting times, location, language, childcare, transportation, trust, cost, cultural safety, or the feeling that the space was not created with certain communities in mind. If a stakeholder group is missing, SweetGrass should slow down, identify who is not at the table, and create more accessible ways for people to engage. That may mean one-on-one conversations, attending existing community gatherings, compensating people for their time, offering language access, partnering with trusted community leaders, or creating feedback tools that do not require people to join formal meetings.

For me, this week’s learning reinforced that diverse stakeholder engagement is not a checkbox. It is an ongoing leadership practice. It requires asking who has voice, who has power, who is missing, and whether the structure allows people to influence the work. SweetGrass cannot be truly community-rooted if community members are only invited to receive services. They also need opportunities to shape priorities, give feedback, name harm, identify needs, and participate in solutions.

Moving forward, I want SweetGrass to continue building a stakeholder engagement process that is relational, accessible, and accountable. The goal is not simply to have a larger Collective. The goal is to build a more representative and responsive network of care. Diverse stakeholder engagement should help SweetGrass become more grounded, more useful, and more accountable to the communities it was created to serve.

References

Leadership Learning Community. (2015, June). Leadership & large-scale change: How to accelerate learning and deepen impact. https://leadershiplearning.org/publications/leadership-large-scale-change

MCH Navigator. (n.d.). Maternal and child health leadership competencies. https://www.mchnavigator.org/trainings/competencies.php